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TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US Send This Review to a Friend
Australian psychiatrist Sam Frank (Guy Pearce) lectures students on memory loss,
differentiating simple forgetfulness from repression of what the mind may not want to remember. It takes a lot of ponderous dialogue, skipping back and forth in time and a boring encounter with Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman he rescues from icy water, before we get a complete fix on what Sam wants to forget and what's really going on in this tedious supernatural story of love and guilt. It's not a film worth worrying about remembering.
Since the trauma and loss Sam has experienced as a boy in a tragic death of his teenage sweetheart has left him without a desire to feel anything emotionally or make connections with people, Pearce plays him phlegmatically, but while dramatically logical, the standoffish performance becomes a very cold and uninteresting one. We first meet Ruby, as Guy does, on a train. She disappears and when she turns out to be the person he plucks from possible death by drowning, she has suffered a loss of memory. He takes her back to the house where he is staying on a visit to old haunts connected with his trip to bury his father and brings her around. As he becomes more and more intrigued by her, he tries hypnosis to evoke who she really is.
The screenplay by director Michael Petroni is filled with pretentious talk that goes with the outlandish story. The film depends very much on the charisma of the stars--very much lacking here--and the extent to which a viewer can buy into the premise and the mystery and accept what Petroni dishes up as searching psychological drama. Good luck.
A Paramount Classics release.
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